Bebe Daniels played the worldly woman who knew exactly what everything cost, and she played her without asking to be liked. Thirty years of silents and shorts came before it; her Dorothy Brock in 42nd Street is the reason to seek her out.
Fi1m perspective
Dorothy Brock, the star of the show within the show in 42nd Street (1933), knows what Abner Dillon's bracelets are worth and what they cost her, and she still slips out to see Pat Denning, George Brent in a raincoat. Bebe Daniels plays her as a woman doing arithmetic. There is no scene where the hard shell comes off to show us the good heart underneath, and she does not seem to think she needs one. Ruby Keeler gets the sympathy in that film. Daniels gets the better part.
By then she had been at it for most of her life. She was on stage at four and in silent shorts from around 1910, and between 1915 and 1919 she made more than 150 of them opposite Harold Lloyd for Hal Roach. That is where the timing comes from: a two-reeler leaves no room to work up to a joke. In 1919 Cecil B. DeMille took her to Paramount, starting with Male and Female, and she spent the 1920s as a leading lady in comedies and dramas, usually cast as the lively young woman beside a bigger male name.
Sound finished a good many silent stars. Daniels sang. Rio Rita (1929) at RKO showed she had a voice and could carry an accent, and it made her a working star in talkies when that was far from guaranteed. The Maltese Falcon (1931) had her as Ruth Wonderly ten years before the version everyone knows. Then came Warner Bros. and 42nd Street, which we scored 82 and which still moves fast and talks hard about money. We liked Dorothy more than we expected to, and the reason is that Daniels never plays her for laughs or for pity; every crack about Dillon is said by someone who has read the contract.
The cost of being good at musicals is that you are a musical star, and when the studios cooled on the form in the mid-1930s her Hollywood career cooled with it. She went to Britain and, with Ben Lyon, built a second career on stage, radio and television that ran into the 1960s. We have not seen enough of that work to judge it here, and the Lloyd shorts are for the patient. The Warner film is the place to start.
On This Is Your Life, around 1954, she said: "I've been away so long, they won't remember me." Watch her count her bracelets and decide for yourself.
Biography
Bebe Daniels was an American actress, singer, dancer, writer and producer. Born Phyllis Virginia Daniels in Dallas, Texas, she began performing on stage as a child and entered films in the silent era, appearing in numerous shorts before taking adult roles.
She became a star at Paramount Pictures and successfully transitioned to sound films, appearing in musicals including Rio Rita (1929) and 42nd Street (1933), in which she played Dorothy Brock. Other credits include The Maltese Falcon (1931).
In 1930 she married actor Ben Lyon. The couple moved to Britain in the mid-1930s, where they achieved success on stage, radio and television, including the long-running series Life with the Lyons. Daniels appeared in around 230 films over a career spanning five decades.
